


Wanda

by EarthGirl3015



Category: Avengers: Age of Ultron - Fandom, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Depression, Female Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mentions of Major Character Death, Natasha being comforting, She just met the guy, She'll get there, Suicidal?, Thinking mean things about Vision, Women Being Awesome, eventually, talk of mental health, wanting to die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 15:25:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15844089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EarthGirl3015/pseuds/EarthGirl3015
Summary: Four days after Ultron





	Wanda

**Author's Note:**

> Hellllllo.  
> OK, so Wanda/Vision is end game, but she's grieving the loss of her brother and he's literally a robot, and she's not in a good place and he's trying to help but he's literally four days old. So he's being nice, but she's not in a place to deal with it. So she refers to Vision as an 'it'. If that upsets you, you shouldn't read. As well as Wanda constantly referencing that she would like to join her brother, but has no actual plans to do so, so...kind of suicidal? Please don't read if you think it will upset you

The grass was almost iridescent. The blades felt smooth and almost sticky as she slowly ran her thumb over them in a circle, counter-clockwise. Small, repetitive notions. Almost unconsciously done. Like blinking, or breathing. 

The sky was as blue as it had seemed in the movies. He…he had loved them more than her, had enjoyed the brainlessness of a few hours spent in front of the small television, watching the actors play action heroes and blow things up, only for everything to turn out well in the end. It hadn’t ended well when they’d tried it for themselves.

The sun was a hot spotlight, making her flinch, she who had grown used to shadows in the last few years. She thought about moving back into the shade, but then she would be closer to the building, to the still open door, and she didn’t want to hear what they were saying. 

The men in suits had arrived early, just as she was trying to find breakfast foods in the kitchen. Everything was so shiny in America; it made her feel as if she would smudge and smear anything she touched. As she felt she had been doing for the last few months. Since the experiments, everything she did turned to mud and ash, it seemed.

The men had obviously not expected her to be there. Or maybe they had been expecting someone else, the Captain, or the Widow or…Stark. Even after everything, her mind could not help but hiss the word. The old hatred burned in her stomach, rising up her throat like bile. Her parents’ faces flashed before her eyes, and her gut twisted painfully.

Either way the suits had stopped, faces suddenly pale and drawn, hands clenching their briefcases with white knuckles. News of her powers had travelled fast then. She shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d saved them all any hassle and simply walked out of the room, out into the beautiful garden, trying to force the shades of grey that clouded her mind to leave her, if only for a moment.

 

Sokovia had been grey for most of her life. She had vague memories of a place before, of sun peeking through fir trees, a sparkling rock she had pulled from a stream, humanoid figures whose faces had smeared with time. Then she and Pietro had ended up with the Maximoff’s, a loving couple who couldn’t have children of their own. The greys had seemed silver then, bright and fresh and new.

A few happy years, enough for both of them to grow a few inches. Then the bombs. The Maximoff’s dead cold eyes, staring at them from across the ruined room, Pietro’s body trapped against hers (he had hidden his face, in the hopes that she wouldn’t see him crying, but she had felt his body shaking and heard his hurried gasps and she had slid her hand into his and she had held, held on tight), and the name, emblazoned into her mind, as it had been printed on the bomb. Stark Industries.

The streets had been cold and hard and mean, and they had grown to mirror them. She would beg for food, and he had quick enough hands to steal it, if no one had felt generous that day. He kept her safe from the men who looked at her with hungry, wolf like eyes, and she kept him from going with the gangs, with the drug-lords, with the desperate girls, no older than them. And from spiders. She had kept him safe from the spiders.

It was like a shard of ice cutting into her heart, but her face broke into a harsh smile, and a gasp of laughter escaped, a mere ghost of what it had once been, as she remembered finding an empty room, free of broken glass and twisted metal, only for Pietro to demand to leave once he’d seen the web in the top corner of the room, and the spider sitting calmly in the centre. She had laughed, her true laugh, and taken it outside, and then they had curled up around each other and survived another night.

 

There had been no spiders in the HYDRA cells. She would be surprised if there had ever been any life in those labs at all. The doctors and scientists had all seemed to be sleep walking, carrying out their duties with the mindlessness of drones, and the guards may as well have been walking, talking slabs of meat. Not that they’d done much talking. Only Strucker had seemed alive in anyway. She wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

Thinking of their time in HYDRA made her feel weary, as though her soul was weighed down with heavy rocks. Lies, honeyed lies, but lies all the same, and in her gut she had known, had seen in their eyes that it was a lie, but the winter was coming, and she had almost died during the last, and Pietro had been so sick she feared he too would die, and there was no food, no warmth to be found and they were both so tired of fighting to live, so they said yes.

She had blocked out the memories of the pain as best as she could, but there were still nights when she had awoken, shivering and cold down to her bones, and nothing could stop it. During those nights she had reached, with her hand to touch the stone wall separating their cells, and with her mind into his, for Pietro and he would turn to face her in his sleep and welcome her in his mind and hold her fast and she would be warm again. Be able to breathe again.

The Avengers had come. Stark had come. His mind was an open book and she had plucked at his fears, as Pietro had once plucked the strings of a broken guitar they’d found in the gutter, and he had built his own doom. ULTRON had spoken honeyed lies too, had plucked her strings in return, and she had been so angry, so tired, so scared, of always being abused, of always being used, of always being lied to, that she had turned her back, and Pietro had followed and they went to the Avengers – to Stark – and asked if they could help.

 

The sun dimmed. The grass no longer seemed to be glowing. In shock, in the present, she turned her head skywards and saw a cloudbank had floated up over the horizon while she had been sitting there, playing with the grass, trying to ignore what was happening inside.

“You’re a special case,” she had been wrapped in a blanket – “For shock,” the Captain had said – as if a blanket could hold her together, could give her her brother back, as if it mattered at all – and Stark had said ‘you’re’, as in ‘you’, as in singular, not the plural, as it had always been, as it should have been! “The government is going to want to have a conversation with you.”

And so, they had come. She could hear the voices, had been hearing them for a while she realised, but had ignored them, lost to the past and the grey and the emptiness at her side, where her twin should be, where he should always be.

They had taken his body. What remained of SHIELD – “The mostly good guys,” Stark had said, a cynical smirk and dead eyes showing his true thoughts on the matter – had taken her brother’s body – pockmarked and bloody with the bullets he’d caught, for a man he barely knew and a child who would live to see another day, but he would not and why? Why, Pietro, why did you choose that moment to be a hero? Why did you leave me? Why won’t they let me see you? Where are you, big brother?

The slow slide of water down her face and the sudden gasping in her chest that hurt more than it should have – she forgot, sometimes, to breathe – and she blinked and the tears began in earnest. The clouds covering the sun, and the green, green grass, and the trees slowly waving in a cool breeze, she could see them, and yet she could not feel them, alone in her grey island of pain and grief and anger and guilt. She was shaking again, shaking so hard she felt she would crumple herself to dust and maybe all of her atoms would just float away, back into the aether they had come from and she could leave all of this behind and go to her brother among the stars. 

 

“Miss Maximoff?”  
The voice was smooth as a stone, almost clinical in its detachment, only the smallest of inflections to accent the question. The android, then. Or the Vision. Whatever they were calling it. She recalled looking into its thoughts, when it had still been in the Cradle, and recoiling, horrified by it and everything it could mean.

 

“Miss Maximoff? Are you well?”  
‘Do you have eyes?’ she wanted to spit, but decided against it. The thing would probably answer that it did indeed have eyes, and they were also capable of x-ray vision or something. Why couldn’t it leave her alone? Anybody else would have left the silent, crying girl alone. Had it not picked up social cues from whatever the stone was in its head?  
Probably not. It had only been alive for four days.

 

“Miss Maximoff, your stomach is making quite a loud sound, indicating that you have not eaten at present, and yet you seem unwilling to change this. Also, you appear to be in some amount of distress. May I assist you in anything?”  
Unbelievable. The robot really wasn’t going to stop pestering her. After it had taken her from Sokovia, after it had forced her to keep living, despite the fact that Pietro was dead, that she would have stayed in that bus and let it crush her, into nothingness, to follow her brother into the dark, it had flown in, cape billowing in the wind, red arms catching her softly to it, like one of the action heroes Pietro had loved so much. She had hated it for that.

 

“Miss Maximoff?”  
She remembered vaguely that part of its brain – whatever its equivalent of a brain was – was part of Stark’s AI, that had doubled as his butler. Perhaps this was a leftover protocol, checking up on Stark’s guests to make sure they were functioning adequately. She was about to open her mouth – to say what, she had no idea – when a crunch sounded from behind them. Twisting to look behind her, Wanda watched as the Widow walked across the gravel towards them.

 

“It’s alright, um…Vision, I’ll help her.” Wanda was amused – somewhere at the back of her mind – that the Widow looked as uncomfortable around the android as she also felt. The redhead looked to Wanda and took in her expression. Her eyes softened as she turned back and said, quietly,  
“This is women’s business.” The android seemed almost startled at that, then opened its mouth – probably to point out it was not entirely human or something – but then closed it and nodded, turning and walking away swiftly. 

The Widow sat down, mirroring Wanda’s cross-legged stance, leaving enough distance between them that their knees wouldn’t brush and looked off, into the middle distance. They sat that way for what felt like an hour. Finally, Wanda broke her silence,  
“What part of this is women’s business?” She barely recognised her own voice, gravelly and cracking. She hadn’t spoken…since it had pulled her from the ruins of Sokovia. Her throat felt dry, and she coughed weakly. There was suddenly a bottle of water beside her right knee. She looked from it, to the Widow, and back. She hadn’t seen her carry it out. As she tipped it back to drink, the Widow took a long breath in.

 

“Grieving those lost in battle has always been women’s business, across continents, across centuries.” Her voice was soft, a mere murmur hardly louder than the wind. Looking at her properly, Wanda saw that the Widow’s gaze, although fixed straight ahead, was fogged, facing inward, not out. “Throughout history, women have raised sons and sent them off to war. Married men who left them within days. Lost parents, and livelihoods and their own lives. And because we are the mothers, the lovers, the sisters, the daughters, the ones left behind, it falls to us to grieve them.” Her eyes fluttered, a suspect gleam suddenly vanished as she straightened up and looked around her, returning to the present, “Even when we join them on the battlefield, it seems,” Her mouth twisted as she said this, and she was the Widow again, as unreachable and untouchable as before.

 

“The Captain grieves,” Wanda’s voice spoke without her permission, “I saw it in his mind. And how can he not? He lost his entire world.”  
“Does he seem bereaved to you?” She twisted back towards the building, and Wanda followed her gaze. The kitchen was visible through the window, and in the half light, Wanda could make out the Captain, Stark and Hawkeye, all gathered around the table, arguing with the men in suits. The Captain, in particular, looked quite angry.  
“Yes,” again, her voice sounded, “He is sad, sad to his very bones, but he pushes it all into his work…”  
“And do you think that’s healthy?” the Widow said, frankly, looking Wanda in the eye now. Under such a shrewd gaze, Wanda’s misbehaving vocal chords shrank. “Stark drinks the better part of two bottles most days, and that’s on his good ones. Clint keeps three knives on his person at all times, a garotte on his wrist and his bow in his room. Rogers gets up at the crack of dawn to run himself ragged, and we all know those muscles come from the serum, its not like he really needs to keep in that good shape. About the only ones with their heads screwed on straight are Rhodes and Sam, and one sees a professional to keep it that way, and the other is basically a professional about this sort of thing.” The Widow broke off, letting out a long breath as she did so. Wanda had the sense that those words had been a long time coming.

“And you?” This question she asked with purpose, genuinely curious about the answer. Not that she was sure if she could trust it; the woman was an expert at manipulation, after all. The Widow let out a short bark of harsh laughter,

“I’m just trying to wipe out the red in my ledger. And the things I’ve done before,” she looked Wanda in the eyes, both of them picturing scenes that they now shared from her past, “There’s no shrink can deal with that.”

The ballet, meant to make her beautiful and fast and graceful. The targets, that had eventually turned into people. The torture training, the seduction training, the survival training. The mind wipes, to prepare her for a new identity. What she did with those new identities. And far down, hidden beneath it all, the knowledge that the Red Room had taken the most basic right a woman could be granted, by nature itself, and taken it away from her. Wanda agreed. Natasha – or was it Natalia? Or Nicola? Nadia? – would need a team of specialists to help her deal with just one of her experiences, never mind everything else.

 

“What is your point?” she found herself saying. The Widow smiled, sincerely this time.

“You’re allowed to grieve. You’re allowed to cry. You’re all of…what, nineteen?”

“Twenty,” They were twenty…no, she was…he…they…she was twenty. Twenty-one in September. Four months away. In four months she would be the one who was older. By a lot more than two minutes.  
With that thought, her mind closed in on itself. There was nothing in her stomach, but it revolted nevertheless. She stretched over her left knee, facing away from the Widow and retched. Nothing came up, of course, and she was choking, choking on her own air, and the tears had started again and she was shaking, shaking, shaking, because he would never be twenty, never be twenty-one, never have his picture on a drivers’ licence, never legally drink in a bar, never meet a dusky blonde with legs for days – his words, not hers – whom he would sweep off her feet and marry within a fortnight. He was gone, there was an emptiness at her side, in her mind, in her heart, where he should have been, but would never be again and it hurt! It hurt more than all of HYDRA’s needles, all of ULTRON’s lies, all of Stark’s bombs. 

She had no idea how long she sat like this, but eventually she became aware of a hand on her shoulder, rubbing softly in circles, a figure kneeling beside her with flaming red hair, and a voice, sweet but pitched low and soft, singing in Russian. She looked up, and was startled by the look she saw on the Widow’s face. For a woman who believed she could not be a mother, she had the look of one now.

“As I was saying, you’re young. You feel everything a lot more than the rest of us. If you try to push this down, it will destroy you. So, feel, Wanda.” It was the first time Natasha had used her name, “Cry as long as you need to, grieve as long as you need to. Don’t hide it.”

She hadn’t expected this. Especially from the one they called the Black Widow. But she could see no trace of a lie in her face, and while tempted to peek into her mind to see if it was likewise genuine, she felt she’d seen enough of the inside of the woman’s head. Instead she nodded and took a series of long breathes, trying to pull herself together. She’d cried enough for one day. Eventually she was able to look up at Natasha and offer a slight smile. 

“Come on, then.” Natasha stood and offered her hand. Still slightly unnerved by the other woman’s treatment, Wanda held on as she was pulled up in an iron grip. “Let’s see what proposal the suits left for you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thinking of turning this into a series. Switching between Natasha and Wanda POV, and probably diverging from canon, because there are not enough fics of awesome badass superhero women helping each other out in my humble opinion. Let me know what you think, constructive criticism please.


End file.
